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The good folks at Google like to keep us guessing don’t they? 2012 alone saw dozens of changes and updates to the mysterious Google algorithm, causing quite a stir among expert internet marketers and everyday business owners alike. While Google claimed that most updates would affect only a small number of sites, lots of businesses felt the pinch and some were crushed altogether.

Even if you’re a novice to internet marketing and search engine optimization, you can likely see a trend in the graph below that doesn’t look too promising.

This traffic report is real data from a client of mine who had received a rather severe drop in traffic after a Google algorithm update in 2011. Their traffic has never recovered…until now.

So how does one recover from these arcane Google changes that have shaken up the internet? Let’s quickly first diagnose the problem.